Martin Beck — Social Abstraction

“This series of works from 2010 is held together by an interest in the emergence of utopian socialities. An important ­reference and point of departure for developing this new body of work was research into the history of communal ­living, in particular rural and ‹dropout› communes throughout the USA in the 1960s. ­Directions, Headlines, and Irritating Behaviors do not investigate this history in a mimetic way, but rather try to identify fragments of the communication that went to determine the image of these new communities. Focusing on how these ­communes interacted and organized themselves via the pages of self-published newsletters, the work examines, how a (non-photographic) image of a new social body was displayed in ephemeral manifestations and instructions. A central interest forms an inquiry into the organization of social, geographic, and architectural spatialities and how a new understanding of spatial organization structured utopian communities. In this context, design and architecture are understood in a broader sense: as a constant that is able to shape a community and mediate it.” (Martin Beck)

Martin Beck (b. Austria, 1963) lives and works in New York and Vienna.